People tend to treat omnichannel as an asset and the next big thing. There is also an admission that omnichannel is somewhat an enigma. If it is an asset, it is still so much a "diamond in the rough" that retail companies, software providers, solution providers and system integrators - all are struggling hard to figure omnichannel and nail it.
Truth be told, I feel that omnichannel is not an OPPORTUNITY, it is a LIABILITY. Until someone builds a product that can provide the seamless experience that omnichannel purports to provide, I will like to plead that it is just a hype.
I like to use a short story to explain this. A man had one watch, he was very happy looking at the shiny thing that told him time, every now and then. His experience was fantastic - all was well.
Then, we give him another watch. Now his focus moved away from using it to get time. He started focusing on why there was discrepancy between the two watches. However much we tried, even the seconds discrepancy looked egregious and nagging to him. His whole customer experience turned tardy and he wanted us to sort it out. So now instead of thanking us for giving him two watches, he was pissed that there is a few seconds' discrepancy between them. So much so that we was ready to throw both watches that we gave them and move to another guy who promised him just a single watch.
So, we now had a new challenge - how could we make both the watches so good, their alignment so smooth, their time so much in sync that the man would have a very seamless experience.
Omnichannel is much like that - in the beginning of time, companies had retail brick and mortar stores and everyone was happy. Then this thing called "internet" showed up. There were some who said "we will sell things only through internet". Great - they were lucky. People called them Ecommerce guys, online retailers and so on.
The original brick and mortar guys got greedy - they said "why can't we get on to internet?". Companies like Infosys, TCS, HCL jumped at this and assured the brick and mortar retailer that they could definitely help it get on internet. The retailer got on to internet thinking that he would start eating the ecommerce guy's lunch.
The technology provider created another channel for retailer to make money. Everyone was happy. Then customer - let us call her Mary - who suddenly got exposed to the second channel started getting frustrated when the online channel of the retailer didn't recognize her despite the fact that she was spending so much in its stores. She understandably was just asking them to identify her as Mary whether she went online or she went in the store to do shopping. She started expecting world of the retailer but the experience was nowhere near that. In fact, most of the time, it seemed as if she was dealing with two different companies when in reality she was simply dealing with the two channels of retailer.
The retailer went to the technology vendor again. Vendor was lost, scratching their heads they decided to go to Guru of Gurus - Mckinsey. After much pensive introspection, Mckinsey came out with the term "multi-channel" that morphed itself into "omnichannel" with the passage of time.
Omnichannel was carved out as a huge opportunity. People created picture perfect view of omnichannel, but just on paper. There were questions on how to translate the paper view into practical technology.
At a high level, Omnichannel is merely three things:-
1) Profile persistence (of the customer)
2) Shopping cart persistence (of the customer)
3) Transaction persistence (of the customer)
If any technology vendor can make a tool or product that allows these three things to come together, we will immediately have omnichannel experience. It could be next big idea for a startup. However, it is easier said than done. Persistence means that data has to synced between different systems in almost real time manner. That means there has to be real time data integration between systems. In the absence of that, the persistence becomes batched and delayed updates to the backend system and therefore loses its meaning.
In the absence of such tool or product, omnichannel remains as much a pipe dream for retailers, as it is a massive liability for them. Customers are unhappy that retailers don't recognize them well enough when they move from channel to channel in the realm of the same retailer.
Meanwhile, the original ecommerce guys like Amazon, Wayfair and eBay are having time of their lives - enjoying the sunshine since all they need to do is - worry and focus on one channel and make it the best.
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